About Me

I am currently a Professor at Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and UConn School of Medicine in Farmington, CT. My research interests are understanding how human immune system works. I am particularly interested in immune aging, regenerative medicine, genetic code and reprogramming, immunotherapy of cancer, and HIV infection and pathogenesis.

I am also very much interested in accelerating technological advances and their potential future impact. Especially I believe exponential advances in biology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence or machine learning are merging and creating a synergistic and remarkable progress in technology. I aim to follow and contribute to these advances with the hope that they will have positive impact on our health, greatly increasing our lifespans, enhancing our standard of living and improving our environment.

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35 thoughts on “About Me”

Very cool site.. At last a central clearing site for tracking the rapid advances in biology and life extension. Too bad I’m not a biologist and only a guy who is interested in technology concepts and trends. Pretty hard to read some of the details in these articles.. but that just means I’m showing off my ignorance.. ugh!

Would like to live long enough to take advantage of some of these COOL developments!

What an excellent site! Thank you very much for putting so much effort into this! Im actually studying for Step 1 right now and wanted to distract myself on the net for a bit. I just happened to come across your blog and my distraction became a review in leukocyte extravasation! That animation is remarkable! Where is it comming from? Lord knows my Immuno prof did not explain things as clearly as the animation! And youve chose then most interesting topics to post about. Im definatly going to be a frequent visitor.
Thanks again!
Lucas

Wow! Such a coincident. Was i just checking one of the top blogs in WordPress and your posting caught my attention, so here am i! I like your blog it’s informative =) Something for me to read and co-relate with my studies!

Not many scientists are inspired to blog. You’re in a class of your own, which is good. The world has allowed non-scientists, who’re usually web-savvy, to contradict science for their own selfish ends. Look at the issue of genetically modified foods. Rather than grounding the debate on the science behind crop genetic engineering, critics instead excoriate corporations like Monsanto, Dupont and Bayer. Well, most people hate big corporations. Anti-biotech groups know this. Therefore, by shouting that GMOs is all about corporate greed, people tend to listen to them.

I am not a scientist myself, but for the last couple of years, I have been promoting public understanding of science through my blog, GMO Africa. I have been called all sorts of names, including ‘shill.” I am from Africa where farmers still rely on antiquated farming methods. Any agricultural technology, including crop genetic engineering, I believe, can improve their lot. Unfortunately, there is a lot of hostility towards agricultural biotechnology, necessitated by highly inflammatory and misleading messages on GMOs by organizations like the Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Yes, caution is necessary when it comes to handling GMOs, but it’s irrational to advise a continent like Africa not even to touch them.

I am always calling upon scientists to wake up and defend their innovations. Don’t allow illiterates, folks who can’t conduct the simplest of a lab experiment, to discredit your work.

Thank you for starting and , more important, maintaining and updating a very helpful site. I live and work in the Philippines, mainly in the field of education and learning. I think that our efforts to develop more effective and more appropriate learnings systems benefit from the exciting advances in neuro and biological sciences. Again, many thanks for this service.

Super site! Thanks – my son & I have had an interesting afternoon viewing several links on here including the Lego Rubik’s cube solver, the 3D on the human body (which he tried to guess what the visuals were) and several of the RSS links. Loved the articles on Nanotech & the RSS link to the Terasem Colloquium. Since hubby also reviewed a lot on here as well, I think this has now become a family fave! ‘Will be back.

How do you have time to write so many posts & continue to do your research and work at the university? You must be a master of time management OR have clones working for you 🙂 Keep up the insightful posts and as always, keep the scientific community on their toes!

Can you please comment on the results of this new study by Robert Lanza regarding animal-human eggs for cloning by creating an entry in your daily news. There is good news and bad news. Human eggs are confirmed and animal eggs for human stem cells are found unviable. This is very important news for a lot of people.

Hi, I was heart transplanted a few years ago have to take care of my health and finds your blog interesting and that you coined the term Biosingularity. I think synthetic biology will be one of the fields in biotechnology that firstly will enter the Singularity.

I’m the chief editor for a site called http://www.NewDoctor.com which is the world’s largest virtual hospital. It is an accredited Telemedicine portal and advance networking tool for Doctors and Patients to communicate through IP phone networks. The site is free for any licensed Doctor and patients can connect to these doctors for free after viewing there profile on the site. The site functions in many different ways. For instance a doctor in West Africa can connect to a cancer care specialist in Los Angeles. To consult on a case using one of the most basic pieces of technology in this era a cell phone. It can also be used for local people in the United States to search and find the best local doctor in any specialty in all 50 States. These is made possible by the acceptance of something called Telemedicine which is widely excepted medical tool by every major medical University as well as by the United States Government and President Obama.

Our site just basically serves as a networking portal to allow this connection and display of profiles to occur. But our vast network of medical doctors in all 50 States in every specialty, numbering over 1,000 strong. Needs to be able to visualize links for great medical and thematic resources. These are not advertising space they are simply free postings for websites that our editorial team seeks out, our one of our users has suggested. And I have selected your blog for inclusive into this network.

Basically we just need your approval to allow use to create you a banner and put you on our resources tab. so our users can visualize this banner and description allowing them to navigate over to your blog.

Something looked a little funny about this study so I looked up the head researcher and, sure enough, “His research is funded by … the US National Dairy Council [and] the Dairy Farmer’s of Canada” (http://fhs.mcmaster.ca/neurorestorative/phillips_stuart.html). How embarrassing to be my alma mater. No wonder he is promoting milk so heavily in his comments going above and beyond what his conclusions support: “it’s a no brainer: milk is the ideal post-workout drink for recreational exercisers and athletes alike.” – and, how many post-exercise drinks did you look at Dr. Phillips? Oh, just milk, a soy beverage and a maltodextrin drink. Pretty grandiose statement there considering the scope of the study.

The milk industry started this campaign about 5 years ago to capture sales from the lucrative exercise recovery drink market. In the process, they funded research at various institutions to try and show that milk is the best recovery drink after weightlifting even though the conclusions of the studies such as this one don’t support this since they’re comparing milk to a soy beverage and a carbohydrate drink. They didn’t compare milk to the other post-exercise drinks that weight lifters commonly consume like muscle milk and other more sophisticated recovery drinks. We know that glutamine, dextrose (to turn off the catabolic hormone, cortisol), BCAAs, protein and many other compounds aid in recovery above and beyond what plain old milk does. Nice try by the dairy industry, however. More recently they’ve plastered ads all over the gyms I go to furthering this campaign by promoting chocolate milk and regular milk as a post-recovery drink. I’d rather not have all that acid and mucus in my stomach, thanks.

The only thing this study tells you is that fat-free milk is better than this particular soy beverage which is Genisoy and is a very low-quality soy product. With obvious conflicts of interest like this, they really should have done a double-blind study. The fact that the main researcher is funded by the dairy industry should be enough to raise some serious questions about the validity and motives of this study. We don’t know how well each group performed in the gym since they state that there was an 86% compliance rate or, what else the subjects were eating the rest of the day, etc. Having the researchers knowing which group was consuming milk could have affected how they encouraged or guided the subjects in the gym.

People should know that milk raises the acid load in the body causing the body to pull alkaline-forming minerals from the bones like calcium and magnesium which leads to a net loss in calcium. If you’ve ever wondered why the countries that consume the most dairy have the highest rate of osteoperosis, this is a likely cause. Also, more than one study has shown casein, one of the proteins in milk, to be a cancer promoter. As people have pointed out, milk increases mucus production which makes it easier to catch colds and can fill up the lungs to dangerous levels especially in those who are lactose-intolerant. Most African Americans are lactose-intolerant and we’re the only species to consume milk after being weaned from breast milk especially the milk of another species. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s unhealthy but it should make people question whether this practice is a good idea and not just assume that it’s natural because it’s been driven into our heads by the dairy industry’s prolific advertising campaigns that start with the lunch programs when we’re in elementary school.

I used to drink a lot of milk in high school thinking I was being extra healthy not knowing that lactose-intolerance is so common and that I was lactose-intolerant. I was a victim of the dairy industry’s campaign of misinformation hiding anything that raises questions about whether cow’s milk is healthy. My stomach was like the insides of a volcano after my meals and I didn’t know why. Of course they excluded lactose-intolerant people from the study.

The editor should know that feeding cows steroids/hormones is a standard practice with factory farms which is where most of the milk comes from. It doesn’t require a scientific study as you requested but I can show you the evidence if you really think there’s any question in this. The only milk that doesn’t have antibiotics and hormones is organic milk and this study didn’t specify the use of organic milk and wasn’t likely used. The growth hormones could have played a role in this study. The estrogens in milk are probably what’s causing females to hit puberty sooner but I’m not claiming this as fact.

There are also plant-based meal replacements with a variety of protein sources that have excellent amino acid profiles and that are full of healthy anti-oxidents and alkaline forming superfoods that also reduce inflammation. Muscle size isn’t the only thing to consider. We don’t even know what’s causing the muscles to measure bigger since the study says that there were no differences in the strength gains.

I would like to see a comparison of milk with other post-recovery drinks that people actually consume and not just a soy drink that probably no one consumes as a post-recovery drink so one can actually say that milk is a good post-recover drink. Until then, no one can say that milk is an excellent post-recovery drink like Dr. Phillips states.